The Defense Department’s newly published cloud strategy leans heavily on several core concepts including maximizing competition among cloud service providers, sticking to a single cloud strategy, leveraging commercial-sector best practices, creating a culture for better technology evolution, and above all else supporting warfighters and increasing their lethality. […]

The Department of Defense published an unclassified version of its long-awaited cloud strategy Monday afternoon, which features an enterprise cloud environment that includes “general-purpose” and “fit-for-purpose” cloud infrastructures achieved through multiple vendors, and identifies seven strategic objectives for the effort. […]

If recent events are any indication, we could be seeing big changes to agency cloud migration plans in 2019. The Federal government could be rethinking its role in owning and operating its own data centers, strongly questioning whether that is a job best left to government employees. […]

Maria Roat, chief information officer at the Small Business Administration, provided a run-down of her office’s extensive to-do list during a keynote address on Thursday at the Veritas Public Sector Vision Day event, and emphasized the importance of laying the proper data-management policy groundwork before embarking on cloud deployments and forays into artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]

The U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) has extended the deadline on a request for information for cloud migration services, with the goal of closing multiple data centers and moving a suite of applications to a commercial cloud environment. The RFI is open until February 20. […]

Data can travel around the world in a blink of an eye and show up on practically any device, be it a networked PC, a phone, or some other mobile component. […]

According to the Nexusguard Q3 2018 Threat Report, 65.5 percent of distributed denial-of-service attacks were launched against communications service providers (CSPs) in the third quarter of 2018. […]

Federal agencies cannot develop an effective strategy to migrate workloads to the cloud without having a solid data strategy in place, according to a leading cloud expert at Booz Allen Hamilton. […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs awarded a $9.9 million contract to establish and manage a new cloud platform for the agency’s mobile applications to Booz Allen Hamilton. […]

As Federal agency leaders look to modernize networks and provide better citizen services, they need to have a “Citizen First” mentality, rather than “Cloud First” or “Cloud Smart,” Claire Bailey, director of Federal, State and Local Mainframe Solutions at Compuware, told MeriTalk. […]

The General Services Administration (GSA) is planning to issue a draft request by the end of January to solicit information on a purchase agreement to develop a cloud computing service called Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) to update the Department of Defense’s (DoD) legacy information technology applications. […]

While the Federal IT community is eager to embrace the benefits of cloud services, agency leaders are working to balance the transition to cloud with Federal policies and maintaining continuous operations, deputy CIOs from the Air Force and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) told the crowd at CES-Government on Friday in Las Vegas. […]

A multi-cloud environment offers Federal agencies the advantages of high resiliency combined with the agility to adapt quickly to changing mission and technology requirements. But if migrating workloads to one cloud environment expands the attack surface, imagine how multiple clouds can extend the attack surface even more. […]

Recent studies on cloud technology and its perceptions in the market reveal concerns over accountability for security in the cloud, poorly communicated cloud strategies, and confusion over what the approach to cloud really means. […]

The Marine Corps Systems Command sent out a request for information on January 7, looking for help in migrating applications from on-prem to commercial cloud environments. Responses are due by January 23. […]

The United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) released a request for information yesterday for IT support services for the Surface Deployment and Distribution Command (SDDC), with a focus on shifting to cloud. Responses are due by January 24. […]

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point will upgrade its email services to a cloud-based model, which the academy said will help facilitate projects and information sharing anywhere, rather than restricting email service to network-capable devices. […]

Public comments on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) draft Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) policy show a desire for OMB to continue the push for modernization amid new metrics and a shift towards optimization over data center closures. […]

The Department of Labor on Dec. 27 released a request for information on a proposal for a new financial management system, with an eye towards a potential move to the cloud and data analytics capabilities. Responses are due by 11 AM on January 16. […]

Pentagon officials are certain that two of the biggest keys to the future of national security are two technologies that, for different reasons, are shrouded in a bit of uncertainty: artificial intelligence and cloud computing. […]

Cloud computing offers benefits and efficiencies, but agencies need to go through the application rationalization process and decide what works best for their situation, said Deputy Federal CIO Margie Graves and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Deputy CIO Steve Rice. […]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud modernization were the main topics of discussion at the Get Cloud Smart: The Art of the Possible event hosted by MeriTalk on December 13. […]

Expect to see more data breaches, attacks on critical infrastructure in the cloud, and more research into vulnerabilities into cloud computing in 2019, according to studies on upcoming threats in the new year. […]

Federal officials are looking at 2019 as the year of the hybrid cloud, as agencies shift from the Cloud First policy of moving pell-mell into as-a-service models to the Cloud Smart policy, which focuses more on making cloud work with legacy systems and serving agency missions. […]

A growing challenge for development and security operation teams (DevSecOps) as they move workloads to cloud infrastructures is how to ensure that functions in the cloud adhere to their agency’s compliance and security policies. Cloud infrastructures are flexible and offer opportunities for settings to be changed or misconfigured, opening more access points for data breaches, system downtime, and costly compliant violations. […]

IT security provider Zscaler said this week it is one of four cloud service providers selected to pursue Joint Authorization Board (JAB) FedRAMP certification, at the High Impact level, through the FedRAMP Connect program. […]

Join MeriTalk as we sit down with government and industry IT thought leaders at the Newseum on Wednesday, May 8 for an engaging half-day discussion on priority cloud computing issues and trends. […]

Experts agreed today that Federal legacy network infrastructure are struggling to keep pace with the growing demands of agency cloud migrations and the continued push to modernize Federal IT systems. […]

How do you get 1,000 folks out of bed in Las Vegas before 7:00 a.m.? […]

The Small Business Administration (SBA) is working with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to run a pilot program to fulfill Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) requirements in the cloud with an innovative approach to meet CDM’s goals. […]